Any tips for beginners?

[LightWaves]

?

[GRhin]

Opening a real can of worms there. There is a lot of opinionated stuff around that. Let me know if you have a specific problem, but i will try my best to give some generic advice. prepare for a wall of text...

1. start playing on maps that are easy to defend (I like border patrol for this).
Quickly wall up the shortest part you can, with as much resources behind the walls as possible. Consider some moat if you are on low ground. Alternatively, if you cant get the wall straight away, build a tower where the enemy has to pass to get to you (can be a few towers), you can connect them later (being on higher ground means your units take 1/3 the damage, and the enemy is less accurate). MOve on to more vulnerable maps as you learn to defend.

2. buy wood at the start.
It is imperative that you get the biggest economy you can as early as you can. Claim all the stone and iron behind your wall, and any stone and iron you can protect out side it. Build food, apples if you have lots of farm space and not much castle space (most productive per worker) or wheat if you have little farm space and lots of castle space (most productive per farm). If you have leftover start gold/wood then get weapons buildings, iron armour is the best if you are producing enough iron, generally 2 or 3 per iron mine will use it all up, depending on how far away the iron is, then fletchers, crossbows are the best even if you have to buy the wood as long as the fletchers arent too far from the stockpile, you wont likely reach the distance where that stops being best with your start resources, but poleturners for spears come next as they only need to pick up one wood per weapon delivery.

3. Beer beer beer
Beer is your best "economy", i find that one brewery can usually support 2 inns, each inn gives beer to 30 population. which you can then tax at -8. You can then sell excess food (alot of math there, trust me, its the most gold-efficient way if you have beer, ill have a youtube video on that soon). beer is better than food, if you have to choose between beer or food, get beer. both is even better of course.

4. defensive army composition.
This is where most of the opinions are. Alot of people will tell you to only get crossbowmen to defend, and horse archers to attack. This is not always best.
When you first start the game, getting some archers for defense is important, european will be enough to hold the first few waves, and will always be the best value for money against rat and snake. By the time the armored units come in in any sort of numbers you will want something a little stronger. Slingers are great to add to existing archers here if you are short on gold, as they do a high amount of damage to melee units, just dont let enemy archers kill them off. If you have a tonne of gold, crossbows are the most cost effective unit against armored units, especially swords and knights (wolf, philip, etc). they are slow firing so if you have AIs sending weaker units like spears and slaves, you will want some archers and/or slingers to deal with that.

5. Offensive army composition
You can just spam Horse archers (HA), and that generally works. play around with seige for fun though. By the time you are attacking you are usually pretty safe, so can take losses on the attacks. experiment and have fun.

Hope that helps you. if you are still stuck for defending, some portable shields are really overpowered (I have a youtube video on them if you want to search for that). Use some untill you are feeling more confident, generally they are considered too powerful to use against AI who cant use them though, so as you learn, try to use them less and less.

Good luck, and remember, the most important part is to have fun!

[LightWaves]

Oh god thats a bit much than i hoped for, tbh ive noticed Monk are not bad choice, they cost mere 10 gold and they just feel better than spearmen. might be wrong but ive won just few game like this (ofc i gave myself an advantage so i can buy the biggest church for monks)

[GRhin]

Monks are like slingers, useless against ranged, but they do a tonne of damage in melee. The main downside is they are only good en-masse. They are far and away the best melee value you can get. However if you have a tonne of gold (which you usually do if your building a cathedral) then your limitation is more workers than gold, in which case getting a more expensive, more powerful unit, thats less powerful than the same gold-worth of monks, is often a better idea.

Imagine spending 2k gold on melee troops, you can get 200 monks (assuming you have the cathedral already), or 30 maces/swords, or 15 knights (this is the *sell* price of weapons, as using them means you lose the gold from selling, if you use the *buy* price then its more like 20). the monks will do way more damage, but it will take a while to get the workers to turn into that many monks, meanwhile your getting more income, maybe more than you are using...

[Simon Said]

Usually monks are kinda bad, I would only use them as a last resort option when your castle is overrun. Spearmen are just garbage and not worth producing ;D

[GRhin]

Actually ive done math with spearmen, I always had the same view as you did, that they were useless. However, having done the math, they out-perform any other melee unit in similar gold-value numbers except for monks or assassins. Again, they drop almost immediately to ranged fire or flames, same as all the other anti-melee units (monks and slingers), which is why they feel like trash, ranged units rule in stronghold. Feel free to PM me (is that a thing on steam?) if you want the math.
I might do a video comparing units at some point, as it is rather surprising.

[Simon Said]

Mmm never looked at it that way, would love to see a video!

[tvizzle1992]

add me lets play

[Augustus]

I recommend getting the Unofficial Community Patch. Fixes a LOT of bugs and re-balances some units along with adding in unfinished features like apothecaries begin able to heal units. It also allows the AI to build cooler castles depending on the install settings you pick and you can even change how many units the AI can make. Though if you set the number very high, I suggest switching to Crusader Extreme because of the unit PopCap. You can disable the magic with the UCP installer and just delete all the Extreme maps and import ones from original crusader

[GRhin]

UCP is definately the best thing. But the number of settings available can be intimidating for new players. Id say get used to the game, and look at the UCP if you enjoy it.

[LightWaves]

Originally posted by Augustus:

I recommend getting the Unofficial Community Patch. Fixes a LOT of bugs and re-balances some units along with adding in unfinished features like apothecaries begin able to heal units. It also allows the AI to build cooler castles depending on the install settings you pick and you can even change how many units the AI can make. Though if you set the number very high, I suggest switching to Crusader Extreme because of the unit PopCap. You can disable the magic with the UCP installer and just delete all the Extreme maps and import ones from original crusader

Honestly it kinda bothers me for a while why does AI sends only like few troops or large wave of a single unit instead of doing proper sieges, so i might have to do it.

[Silberfuchs]

The AI's are all about flair.

Each AI favours other units and styles (they stick to), and they ramp up the size of attacks til they reach their programed max size.

Hence a rat can't beat a wolf etc, but as said before: community made AI's can be MUCH nastier.